April 25 2008
Case Study - Thomson Holidays
Thomson Holidays used usability testing to help them better understand online customer behaviour and save over £1.5 million in 'lost' revenue
The holiday industry has changed vastly over the past ten years. Booking holidays is no longer restricted to going into a local travel agent or calling a tour operator, now the majority of people go online. As a result, the online travel industry has become extremely competitive and complex. In the UK alone, there are more than 9,000 travel websites. This gives customers a vast array of choices, but also means that visitors will simply switch to another site if an online experience is not satisfactory. In order to retain its market leadership position and to maximise revenue from this extremely important sales channel, Thomson is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to deliver top class service to its customers.
In 2007, Thomson launched a new web site to provide enhanced functionality for its one million visitors per week. The new site featured an updated user interface and a new search engine called Powersearch. Booking holidays online is complicated—there are changing variables like arrival and departure dates, and changing components like flights, cars and hotels. Usability of the site is critical; and, the goal of Powersearch is to keep the steps of the online purchase process as simple as possible.
In light of its increased investment, Thomson wanted to test the site thoroughly so after researching a variety of solutions, Thomson selected Tealeaf and their suite of Customer Experience Management solutions.
Tealeaf captures every action each visitor makes on the web site—a very powerful and complex set of data. Tealeaf then alerts Thomson when the site is preventing customers from completing a booking. Once alerted, Thomson can then access Tealeaf’s replay ability—a page-by-page, browser-level recording of the actual customer experience—to observe and analyse behaviour and take the necessary actions to improve site usability and remove site obstacles.
As soon as Tealeaf was deployed, Thomson was alerted to the fact that a significant number of bookings were failing. According to Thomson’s web analytics and performance management systems there was a slight increase in failures, but nothing as big as Tealeaf was reporting.
With Tealeaf, Thomson discovered they had a larger problem than they first realised. The town field on the address form was not accepting hyphens and dashes (e.g., Weston-super-Mare). All visitors trying to book online from a town or city with these characters were getting a “town invalid” message, with the majority abandoning the purchase as a result.
The visual evidence proved invaluable, and without Tealeaf it would not have analysed the failed bookings and been able to act swiftly to fix the problem. In addition, because Tealeaf allowed Thomson to quantify the business impact of this one customer experience flaw, they would not have realised they were losing at least 30,000 pounds per week in lost bookings.
After the new site went live, Thomson began receiving emails and calls from customers reporting that the confirmation screen and email they received included strange data instead of their personal information. For example, instead of saying, “Dear John” the email would say, “Dear First Name.” When Thomson’s IT team tried to reproduce the problem they were unable to isolate the issue.
Tealeaf enabled Thomson to discover that, occasionally, the site would malfunction between the “enter personal details” and “payment” steps in the booking process. When this happened the customer’s information would be replaced with the “Dear First Name” data rather than the actual details.
